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Related papers: Reward Design with Language Models

200 papers

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved notable success in numerous robotic applications, designing a high-performing reward function remains a challenging task that often requires substantial manual input. Recently, Large…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Jiayang Song , Zhehua Zhou , Jiawei Liu , Chunrong Fang , Zhan Shu , Lei Ma

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two powerful approaches for building autonomous agents. However, due to limited understanding of the game environment, agents often resort to inefficient exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Ziyu Chen , Zhiqing Xiao , Xinbei Jiang , Junbo Zhao

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Designing efficient reward functions for low-level control tasks is a challenging problem. Recent research aims to reduce reliance on expert experience by using Large Language Models (LLMs) with task information to generate dense reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ning Gao , Xiuhui Zhang , Xingyu Jiang , Mukang You , Mohan Zhang , Yue Deng

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Alexander G. Padula , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving various control, optimization, and sequential decision making tasks. However, designing reward functions for complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Xuan Zhao , Marcos Campos

Designing rewards for autonomous cyber attack and defense learning agents in a complex, dynamic environment is a challenging task for subject matter experts. We propose a large language model (LLM)-based reward design approach to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Sayak Mukherjee , Samrat Chatterjee , Emilie Purvine , Ted Fujimoto , Tegan Emerson

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pretrained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially when only few downstream data are available. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mingkai Deng , Jianyu Wang , Cheng-Ping Hsieh , Yihan Wang , Han Guo , Tianmin Shu , Meng Song , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

LLM-based (Large Language Model) GUI (Graphical User Interface) agents can potentially reshape our daily lives significantly. However, current LLM-based GUI agents suffer from the scarcity of high-quality training data owing to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Danyang Zhang , Situo Zhang , Ziyue Yang , Zichen Zhu , Zihan Zhao , Ruisheng Cao , Lu Chen , Kai Yu

Learning reward functions remains the bottleneck to equip a robot with a broad repertoire of skills. Large Language Models (LLM) contain valuable task-related knowledge that can potentially aid in the learning of reward functions. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Yuwei Zeng , Yao Mu , Lin Shao

Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Carmelo Sferrazza , Younggyo Seo , Stephen James , Pieter Abbeel

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

Reward engineering, the manual specification of reward functions to induce desired agent behavior, remains a fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning. This difficulty is amplified by credit assignment ambiguity,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Haoran Su , Yandong Sun , Congjia Yu

The functionality of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is primarily determined by two capabilities: action planning and answer summarization. The former, action planning, is the core capability that dictates an agent's performance. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhiwei Li , Yong Hu , Wenqing Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Large pretrained models are showing increasingly better performance in reasoning and planning tasks across different modalities, opening the possibility to leverage them for complex sequential decision making problems. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Martin Klissarov , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Bogdan Mazoure

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…